There’s never any shortage of comments online at the News’ website, wwpinfo.com. But there’s often a shortage of substance — the vitriolic rants, the clever uses of sarcasm, etc. only go so far in trying to create this summary for our print edition. But the March 18 letter to the editor from Quentin Walsh, titled “What Happened To 2% Budget Cap?,” attracted 31 comments on the website. In the letter Walsh, a CPA who is also the husband of school board member Ellen Walsh, asserted that the district has side-stepped the state-mandated 2 percent budget cap by creating a “capital reserve” of more than $6 million.
Among those posting comments was Hemant Marathe, the school board president, who noted that he was expressing only his personal opinions. The full exchange will appear in the online version of this issue, available at www.wwpinfo.com. As always, we remind readers that signed posts sent also to our editor — rein@wwpinfo.com — will be considered for publication in the print edition coming out April 15.
Marathe posted several comments, including the following: “Mr. Walsh is entitled to his opinion. However, he misstates what was promised during the 2006 referendum. The district promised that ‘in the years immediately after approval of the referendum the annual debt service expense for the district will not exceed $11.1 million.’ In fact the debt service expense in the proposed 2011-’12 budget is $9.74 million — considerably less than what was promised during the 2006 referendum. Every year since the referendum the debt service expense has been less than $11.1 million.
“Mr. Walsh also creates an impression that there is no ‘cap’ on debt service expense. In fact debt service expense has an absolute cap. The district can’t raise more money than required to service the debt. In fact the proposed 2011-’12 budget raises only $7.35 million from the debt service tax levy, which is $1.9 million under the cap.
“Mr. Walsh claims that our property taxes went up by 6.5 percent in 2010-’11. He is technically correct but leaves out crucial pieces of information. In fact, the total taxes in 2010-11 budget increased by $8.76 million. However, this was a result of loss of state aid in the amount of $8.14 million and decrease in fund balance of $0.60 million. Thus the net increase in school property taxes due to all other factors for 2010-’11 budget year was only $20,000 or 0.02 percent.
“In fact I would like to encourage everyone to look at school tax portion of your own tax bill and compare whether the reality matches with the perception Mr. Walsh wants to create. My friend owns a typical house in Plainsboro. His property taxes have gone up from $7,461 in 2006 to $7,949 in 2010 — an increase of $488 for an annual increase of 1.6 percent. During the same time period the Consumer Price index (CPI) increased at a rate of 2.2 percent.”
In a subsequent post Walsh disputed Marathe’s numbers: “My total property taxes have increased by 10.5 percent between 2006 and 2010, so an average of 2.6 percent per year. That is higher than the CPI increase of 2.2 percent.”
That generated a rebuttal by Marathe, excerpted here: “Again you are entitled to your opinion. However, we are discussing the school tax portion of the property tax only. You use your total tax bill to make misleading statements. Can we only talk about issues the school board controls? What is creative here is your use of unrelated taxes to blame the school district.
“Here are the school property tax rates for Plainsboro: 2006 – $1.45; 2007 – $1.44; 2008 – $1.36; 2009 – $1.45; 2010 – $1.55. Simple math show an increase in rate between 2006 and 2010 of $0.10 or 6.9 percent over a four-year period.
“The truth is that the school property tax rate went down in 2007 and 2008.”
